• Welcome
• Background Questionnaire
• List of Heuristics
  • Nielson`s Heuristics
  • ITSM Heuristics
• Evaluation
  • Evaluation Guide
  • Problem Specification
  • Revise Problems
  • System Access Guide
• Post-evaluation interview

List of ITSM Heuristics

1- Visibility of activity status: 

Provide users with awareness about the status of the activity distributed over time and space. The status may include the other users involved in the activity, their actions, and distribution of work between them; rules that govern the activity; tools, information, and materials used in the activity; and progress toward the activity objective. Provide communication channels for transferring the status of the activity. While providing awareness is crucial, limit the awareness to only what the user needs to know to complete his actions. 

2- History of actions and changes on artefacts:  

Allow capturing of the history of actions and changes on tools or other artefacts such as policies, logs, and communication between users. Provide a means for searching and analyzing historical information. 

3- Flexible representation of information: 

Allow changing the representation of information to suit the target audience and their current task. Support flexible reports. Allow tools to change the representation of their input/output for flexible combination with other tools.

4- Rules and constraints: 

Promote rules and constraints on ITSM activities, but provide freedom to choose different paths that respect the constraints. Constraints can be enforced in multiple layers. For example, a tool could constrain the possible actions based on the task, the chosen strategy for performing the task (e.g., the order of performing actions), the social and organizational structure (e.g., number of subjects involved in the task, policies, standards), and the competency of the user.  

5- Planning and dividing work between users:

Facilitate dividing work between the users involved in an activity. For routine and pre-determined tasks, allow incorporation of a workflow. For unknown conditions, allow generation of new work plans and incorporation of new users. 

6- Capturing, sharing, and discovery of knowledge: 

Allow users to capture and store their knowledge. This could be explicit by means of generating documents, web-pages, scripts, and notes, or implicit by providing access to a history of their previous actions. Tools should then facilitate sharing such knowledge with other users. Furthermore, tools should facilitate discovery of the required knowledge source. The knowledge source can be an artefact (e.g., document, web-page, script) or a person who possesses the knowledge. Provide means of communicating with the person who possess the knowledge.

7- Verification of knowledge: 

For critical ITSM activities, tools should help SPs validate their knowledge about the actions required for performing the activity. Allow users to perform actions on a test environment and validate the results of these actions before applying them to the real system. Allow users to document the required actions in the form of a note or a script. This helps the users or their colleagues to review the required actions before applying them to the system.